Does the salary cap actually exist for the Eagles? How Howie Roseman became a magician at manipulating the cap

When mentioning salary cap space and the Philadelphia Eagles, there are typically more questions than answers. How can the Eagles afford all these players? How do the Eagles create so much cap space every year? Why is the cap arbitrary for the Eagles and not other teams?

Thanks to the Eagles, the pundits question whether the salary cap is a myth. Eagles general manager Howie Roseman is just good at manipulating it, continuing to use the business of the NFL to his advantage. 

How is Roseman able to create salary cap space every year, making the Eagles annual players in free agency  in the process? The Eagles certainly don’t run their front office like the New Orleans Saints, Los Angeles Chargers and Dallas Cowboys — and it shows. 

Contracts heavy on the back end

The average annual salary is what the contract shows, yet the Eagles structure their contracts that have high salary cap hits toward the end of the deal and low cap numbers at the start of the contract. That’s at least the case for the free agent signings and trade acquisitions based on the contracts over the past few years.

Saquon Barkley: $3,905,882 cap hit in year one after signing a three-year, $37.75 million deal. Cap hit is $15.575 million in year three. A.J. Brown: $8,318,894 cap hit in year one after signing a four-year, $100 million extension. Cap hit is $41,505,895 in year four.Haason Reddick: $3,878,000 cap hit in year one after signing a three-year, $45 million deal. Cap hit is $21.827 million in year three. 

Voided years

The Eagles have plenty of fake contract years in contracts as a way to create cap space. The void years push back salary cap charges so that when the player’s contract expires, the salary in the void years of the contract account for that season. Haason Reddick, for example, has a void year of $14.688 million in 2025 — even though he’s not under contract. If the Eagles let Reddick leave in…

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Author : Jeff Kerr

Publish date : 2024-03-13 16:39:30

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